judah’s blog

A friend and I had a very interesting conversation. It went something like this, “I think you should become a truck driver. ” I said, “Why?” He said, “You seem to be chasing a carrot at the end of the string. New technology comes out and all the work you did on the previous technology becomes obsolete. I can make as much as you for driving around.” It went on like this for a while back and forth. He, as a truck driver, makes more than me for driving. He can make $40k to $80k a year. I can make roughly $40k as an ActionScript programmer in a small town in Iowa. I know other languages and tools but Flash is the one that I am wanted for right now. (Hey, I just noticed I have my underwear on backwards. hehe)

What he said hit a nerve. We have talked about it before. What is chasing the technology dragons tail? It is adopting the newest technology in the hope and the prayer that it will come and save me from the all the previous technologies short comings. In my case, it is a new web software tool that will make all my current troubles as a web designer, developer and programmer go away.

This exists in other fields of technology as well. In television, you have people who want a better and clearer picture. They want higher resolution, more color, wider display. And manufacturers of television are happy to continue to give them that. Every year the resolution and picture quality of televisions and monitors goes up.

But unlike in the context of illicit drugs, some fields in technology have caught the dragons tail, so to speak. The chasing does come to an end and you can work comfortably. The software does end up doing what you want. I’ve seen this happen for graphic artists with the new releases of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I’ve seen this happen with Adobe Premiere. The user of the software is no longer fighting with the software or working around limitations. They are using it comfortably and they are able to focus on the end result. My theory is that this usually happens at version 8 or 9 of a software release. People in their respective fields get the tools they want, where it does what they want it to do. This is what I want for the web.

So what happened with web design? My quest happens to be in finding the perfect software in the field of web design and development. I had almost a perfect tool with Drumbeat 2000 by Elemental Software but Macromedia bought them out and canceled the project. It had wyswig (what you see is what you get) layout, contracts, which were premade code snippets that you could customize without coding and database connectivity. Contracts were like components for code snippets. You could pick and choose a contract and then change properties of the code snippet in the property inspector. Believe me, it worked. You could connect to a database inside the program, similar to Dreamweaver, and choose the fields you wanted to display. It was great but it is obsolete now.

There is still not a web tool that has come close to providing what a typical web developer needs. I am talking about for Web 2.0 standards which is another way of saying, higher standard of quality, which is what I and many others have always been aiming for.

The problem and limitations with web tools have been specifically tied to the technology they are trying to support. The Flash Player seems to get around most of that. That is why I am following Flex 2 closely. The only problem I see with Flex is that they are focusing on creating a tool for Rich Internet Applications (RIA). I am afraid they will leave out the needs of the web designer that will be using it. What I mean is that it seems that the tool is the center rather than the web designer. I don’t know this for sure. It’s too early to tell.

For example, the web designer may find they need FTP in the program. By making their goal only to create a tool for RIA they may say, “This is out of scope. Go download an FTP tool.” Now, I don’t want FTP in Flex personally. This is just an example. But other features may seem “out of scope” too. And they leave voids in the tool. But for me, I’ve had to learn this, the work really dictates the tools you need. For example, a construction worker may be using certain tools so often that it would be better for him to buy them than continue to rent them. A web designer may be using certain external programs so much that it might be better to integrate them than constantly switch between them.

Addendum: After spending time reading the Adobe blogs and seeing what some of the Adobe developers are doing I am more confident in the outcome of Flex.

The things I’d like to see in web software are:

• Easy to layout or import a design
• Easy to modify a design
• Easy to create an inifinite amount of pages based off of a design
• Easy way to update all pages based off of a design
• Easy way to changes pages or states
• Easy way to use and create transitions
• Easy way to get, display and format textual content
• Easy way to get, display and format external, dynamic content
• Easy way to manage internal content
• Easy way to manage external, dynamic content (CMS)
• Easy way to apply behaviors
• Easy way to create and reuse behaviors
• Easy to use components
• Easy way to create and reuse components
• Cross platform, cross browser

I over use the term “easy” because up until now it is has been a nightmare.

Delivery Mechanism	Strong points	What it still needs	Development vs Bug Fixing Ratio
HTML (or a server side technology – ASP, JSP, PHP, CF etc)	Formatting of text in documents. Dynamic content through server side mechanism.	Render the same across all browsers. Layout tags that render the same across all browsers. Better graphical and animation capabilities.	1:4 to 1:10
HTML + JavaScript	Validation, forms, dynamic html, AJAX.	JavaScript supported the same across browsers.	1:6
HTML + CSS	Create and reuse styles everywhere. Absolute positioning.	Render the same across browsers. Supported the same features across browsers. CSS is flakey in most current browsers.	1:6
Flash	Wysiwyg. Elements are positioned where you want them. Extensive graphic support. Fast, easy animation. Vector graphic support. Looks the same across all browsers. Works the same across all browsers (linux support is in limbo)	Requires purchase of Flash IDE. Numerous bugs exist in the player, language and ide. (these have been fixed in the new player, the new language). The Flash website design process needs to be intuitive. Preloaders should be built in. Development enviornment for Flash IDE needs work. Support for database tools or remoting tools in the IDE. Better support for html.	1:6
Flex 2	Same pros as Flash. Twenty times faster than Flash. Supports Containers, with absolute or automatic positioning (similar to XUL vbox, hbox, xbox etc.). Suports cool things like states, transitions, etc. Free Flex compiler SDK. Gets closest to the things mentioned in my list	Hard to not require Flex IDE (if the price is high this could be an issue). Needs better support for HTML. Needs support for database tools and remoting tools in the IDE. Needs rich text editing tools in IDE. The need to built features for people that want to make websites with it not only RIA’s	NA (still in beta)
Microsoft Expression	Looks like a nice set of tools.	It is not clear if it will only support Windows.	NA
Others

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 7:39 am and is filed under Flash, Flex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.